Multifrequency radar observations of marine clouds during the EPCAPE campaign

The Eastern Pacific Cloud Aerosol Precipitation Experiment (EPCAPE) is a year-round campaign conducted by the US Department of Energy at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla, CA, USA, with a focus on characterizing atmospheric processes at a coastal location. A new Ka, W and G-band (35.75, 94.88 and 238.8 GHz) profiling atmospheric radar, named CloudCube, and developed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, took part in the experiment during six weeks in March and April, 2023. This article describes the unique data sets that were obtained during the field campaign from a variety of marine clouds and light precipitation. These are, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, the first observations of atmospheric clouds using simultaneous multifrequency measurements including 238.8 GHz. These data sets therefore provide an exceptional opportunity to study and analyze hydrometeors with diameters in the millimeter and submillimeter size range, that can be used to better understand cloud and precipitation structure, formation, and evolution. The data sets referenced in this article are intended to provide a complete, extensive and high-quality collection of G-band data, in the form of reflectivity and Doppler velocity profiles. In addition, Ka and W-band reflectivity and Ka, W and G-band reflectivity ratio profiles are included for several cases of interest. The data sets can be found at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10076228 (Socuellamos et al., 2023a)